22. Leaders can laugh. 

At themselves. One of the aspects of a mature seasoned leader is confidence. Confidence is an interesting thing, when you have it you know when to take yourself seriously and when to realize you are being ridiculous. Being able to laugh at yourself is one of the best ways to build trust with a team. It provides an opportunity to expose a weakness in a healthy and constructive way. Try it out sometime.    

Then there is the other side of humor. Have you ever gotten so intense that things just don’t seem funny at all. Perhaps its stress, or focus or something else but the world becomes a place where you work hard at achieving the next objective. Someone might give you friendly advice to stop and smell the roses and all you want to do is snarl at them and get back to work. Ever felt that way? I find the best medicine for this condition is to laugh hard. Laugh so hard your face hurts.  

Challenge: Attend a comedy show at a local venue. It really doesn’t matter who it is or what they are talking about just go and laugh hard. Be careful though some comedy show humor can be extremely vulgar.